On 03/25/11 2:43 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: > So doesn't that mean you need to start the next design sooner vs later? > If the middleware layer handles most of the component interaction you > might have some freedom to make piecemeal changes. On the other hand, > distributed database technology is still evolving rapidly so if you > aren't running into scaling problems waiting might be a good idea. we're doing fine for now... the main databases are Oracle 10g, we're testing 11g now, and have been moved from big Sun Solaris boxes to big IBM Power AIX boxes. A production server in Thailand I was just doing performance monitoring on has 16 x 3Ghz CPUs on a Power 750 (w/ 4 threads per core) and 96GB ram, and was humming along just fine, once I convinced the local operations folks that one of our newer software components needed its queue files on different disks than the main oracle DB. Kinda scary watching 64 CPU threads all running at 50-75% and 20 different SAN LUN's humming at 50% write bandwidth, and realizing the system was working just fine. This particular logical server (its a hardware partition or LPAR on a larger box) is running what traditionally was 2 seperate systems, so we can unload it back onto two systems if needed, and also scale each systems several times larger each without getting into architectural limitations, just buy cutting big checks for more capital equipment. CentOS gets used extensively in the middleware layer, btw.